Justice Renu Mandhane is one of Ontario’s foremost judicial activists, so it should surprise no one that she’ll stoop to using racism as a basis to let Black men off the hook for possessing illegal guns.
That’s what happened at the end of March in the case of
, who had been pulled over and detained for having outstanding drug charges and a suspended license, and whose car, in the process, was discovered to be illegally housing an unlicensed firearm.
The episode began when a Brampton police officer, Anand Gandhi, was notified by his cruiser’s licence plate scanner flagged a nearby Jeep for a week-long impound due to the owner’s active infractions. Given the pending charges, the officer called for backup just in case. He then approached Cameron’s Jeep, identified him, handcuffed him, patted him down, and sat him in the back of the police car.
“Officer Gandhi specifically denied treating the accused differently or handcuffing him behind his back because of the way he looked, i.e. because he was a Black man,” wrote the judge. “The officer maintained that it was his ‘common practice’ to handcuff and place suspended drivers in the back of his cruiser because it was a ‘safe place’ to speak with them.”
The judge noted that the officer had pulled over a woman earlier that day for driving on a medical suspension, but didn’t cuff her or keep her in the police car. Her car, however, was not being impounded, and she wasn’t said to have outstanding criminal charges.
After other officers arrived, the Jeep was searched for the alleged purpose of taking a pre-tow inventory. Some licence plates were found, which Cameron attributed to his girlfriend, as well as a gun, which was under a cargo mat covered by construction materials.
Mandhane didn’t outright state that the gun was loaded, but she did note that ammunition was photographed by an officer after the weapon was made “safe of any ammunition.”
The officer then placed Cameron under arrest for gun charges and attempted to help him reach his lawyer, who didn’t pick up; 15 or so minutes later, he asked Cameron if “everything in the vehicle” was his. (This, the Crown admitted, was an infringement of Cameron’s Charter right to speak to counsel.)
The other alleged rights infringements were less clear-cut. Cameron’s lawyer argued that he was unlawfully detained from the outset and that his car was subject to an unreasonable warrantless search, violating his respective Section 9 and 8 Charter rights. There is indeed precedent from the Supreme Court of Canada stating that it’s wrong to detain a motorist in a police car without necessity (in that case, the driver didn’t have outstanding drug charges)
—
but it’s
not enough to get evidence tossed
if the officer operates in good faith. The
and the
have also permitted warrantless inventory searches of cars in the past, but those precedents were not applied here.
Ultimately, the judge emphatically agreed with defence, ruling that Cameron’s rights had been so severely violated that the evidence for his illegal possession of a (possibly loaded) gun was to be thrown out, rendering a firearms conviction impossible.
Why? Racism. Though Mandhane found “no direct evidence of racial profiling,” she nevertheless determined that Cameron’s treatment was “motivated in part by the fact that he is a Black man” — either the product of a lie or unconscious bias on the arresting officer’s part.
“Officer Gandhi’s decision has common indicia of racial profiling, namely, deviations from standard police practice (i.e. not using restraint when arresting or detaining), failing to assess the totality of the situation (i.e. not observing the lack of safety concerns or risk of absconding), and an insufficient non-discriminatory reasons for the treatment (i.e. resort to ‘common practice’).”
Cameron’s detention was largely a problem, Mandhane wrote, because he was handcuffed within two minutes of meeting the officer, and before the officer confirmed any suspensions in the police database.
“The only available inference is that Officer Gandhi subjected the accused to an arbitrary detention in part because he was Black,” figured the judge. While he accepted that the officer didn’t believe he was treating Cameron differently due to race, she found that “he was influenced by his unconscious racial biases when deciding how to treat the accused.”
The search, too, was tainted. Mandhane noted a few brief points throughout the arrest where the arresting officer turned off his microphone to speak to the other officers (at the time, policy was unclear as to whether that was correct protocol, though it’s since been clarified in Ontario that mics must stay on). Here, she guessed that the officer muted his microphone to express that he “suspected that the accused might have drugs in the Jeep.”
This, Mandhane continued, was evidence that the search of the car was “tainted by racial bias” because the officer “formed the intention to search the Jeep for evidence of criminal activity immediately after learning that the driver was a Black man. This is the only logical explanation.”
After filling in all unknown variables with the explanation of racism, the judge determined that the officer “assumed that the accused was more dangerous than other suspended drivers because he was Black,” that his “unconscious bias led him to exercise his discretion in favour of arresting and detaining the accused … for 90 minutes,” and that he “relied on stereotypes about Black people being more prone to criminality to illegally search his Jeep.”
It’s one thing to drop evidence because of obscenely racist police conduct — but here, so much of the judge’s reasoning simply came down to Cameron’s identity and conducting the equivalent of a palm-read to diagnose the arresting officer with untreated racism. Really, it’s Mandhane whose beliefs should be in question, as she has stated plainly for the record that race is one of her major considerations in deciding whether an individual’s rights were violated, and whether to throw out any evidence that could incriminate them.
This was likely the expectation when Justin Trudeau appointed Mandhane to her post in 2020. In the past, she invented a whole new category of lawsuit — the tort of family violence — to make a political
of her court’s disdain for family violence. Because there already exist a number of different types of lawsuits that encompass spousal and child abuse, her move was completely unnecessary (and indeed inappropriate, given her position as an unelected judge).
Prior to that, as the Ontario Human Rights commissioner, she
that Ontario’s public service was systematically racist because its demographics don’t perfectly reflect those of the Ontario population. In that office, one of her
was the
elimination of racial profiling
in Ontario, which she considered a proven phenomenon due to police statistics showing that Black and Indigenous youth were being disproportionately stopped by police (while not engaging with the fact that some groups commit more crimes, and are
to populate the ranks of Toronto’s most wanted).
So, faced with a Black man’s active drug charges and illegal perhaps-loaded gun, this judge took issue not with the objective threat of a dangerous unauthorized weapon, but the racism she imagined into the entire scenario as part of her greater quest to cement racial thinking into the Canadian justice system.
“The short-term gains that flow from racial profiling in terms of police investigations and evidence-gathering cannot overshadow the intergenerational trauma that anti-Black racism in policing causes and the social ills it perpetuates,” concluded Mandhane. If that’s the cost of safety in Brampton, she seems to say, then so be it.
National Post
